


Knowing

by sheafrotherdon



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-12-25
Updated: 2005-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-11 23:24:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/118308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheafrotherdon/pseuds/sheafrotherdon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His body understands long before his mind can grasp what he's seeing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Knowing

His body understands long before his mind can grasp what he's seeing. Even as he pulls Harry against his chest, holding him back from the veil's settling whisper, his fingertips prickle, sting and are numb. Loss has never been a subtle creature, and it announces its presence with typical cruelty, ripping away the means by which he's assured himself of Sirius these long, dark, months. He has no time to pause and reflect – he acts upon habit, breaks the spell that humiliates Neville, offers Harry what counsel he can. But he rubs his fingertips over and against one another, desperate to reject the truth that his body accepts.

 _You will never touch him; not now, not again._

He can't return to Grimmauld Place that night – fears the thief who would rob him of memory, already deadening the skin at his palm. Where elbow, shoulder, hip and knee had trembled, pressed into the pleading arc of his open hand, there is nothing left but a twisting echo. He walks, bewildered, grinds denial beneath his feet for mile after mile of litter-strewn pavement. He tries to evade, but grief steals kisses from the jut of his elbow, from the soft, shy skin of his upper arm. Early summer is restless around him, but the curve of his spine is quiet with cold.

By the time he can stand to face his ghosts, Molly has already stripped the bed. It's her own act of coping, he understands, but he's angry regardless, curls his fist behind his back as if he might strike her, lowers his head and turns away.

It's daylight as he sits on a dusty couch in a room he barely recognizes, but his shoulders ache with the weight of night. He presses his fist to his sternum, feels his skin tingle and fade to sleep. His mind is awake with empty wishes, but the small of his back flares with ice-sharp pain, then deadens to the touch of a hand that can no longer reach him.

Summer burns into fall.

There's duty and Order, obligation to structure his world, and when his fingers fumble the curve of a teacup, no one remarks on his clumsiness. Beneath the assault of the moon's gentle rage, stubbed toes and torn knuckles go unnoticed, and when he grows his hair Molly clucks her disapproval but says no more. She doesn't know – cannot – that the curls at his neck are meant to hide treasures away from grief. It works for a while – it's November before winter can swallow the memory of sleep-soft lips.

Were it not for Bill, Remus might drift into nothingness, settle into ash, content and cold. But Bill has no respect for solitude and silence; he coaxes and wheedles, bribes and demands until Remus gives in, hunches his shoulders against the wind and concedes to walk to dingy cafes, snagging his trousers against splintered chair legs and eating curries with cheap, plastic forks. They carefully talk of nothing important – ignore the creeping menace in each day's news; pretend Remus has no particular mission; forget the ancient magic that Bill confronts with a singular thirst. They manage, one evening, to discuss the virtues of cardamom for fifteen minutes, and Remus finds it in him to offer a rusty smile. But the comfort of friendship always fades by morning, and the frostbite of loss is all the more painful for the prospect of a hoped-for thaw.

Christmas comes, and Remus acquiesces to a season that cannot move him. Bill drags him to the pub in Ottery St Catchpole, installs him by a fire and presses a pint into his unsteady hands. Remus watches with sheepish horror as Bill sweeps the regulars into a riotous chorus of 'Good Wizard Folk Rejoice,' a song that deploys a range of inventive lyrics that would sear the sensibility of lesser folk. Swallowing his beer, Remus realizes he's witnessing 'home' in a sense he can never claim. He stares at the fire that does not warm him, and breathes out a frosted wish.

Hours later, the Burrow's attic is quiet and warm, and Remus collapses into a borrowed bed with devout thankfulness for the quiet and dark. His last thought is of the dead, and he flees from wakefulness with the abandon of one who has few places left to hide.

It's a shift of the bed that wakes him - a weight and warmth near his legs that confuses him out of sleep. "Leave m'be," he mumbles, sure he's about to hexed toward Tuesday by a meddling, younger Weasley. He can't remember where he's put his wand.

"Not a chance," comes the reply.

Remus blinks and freezes, quelling the hope that flares in his stomach with force enough to wake him fully. "Not this," he whispers.

"Not what?"

A hand rests on his knee and he shivers, half-remembered fragments of thought spinning out from that contact, barely dulled by hand-knitted blankets. "Not this - not my mind," he murmurs in desperation. "Don't take that too."

" _Remus_."

He catches his breath, chokes off the plea that rises to his throat, refuses to accept what his heart races toward. "Not possible," he whispers to himself, a hard-won mantra. "Not possible, not possible."

But fingers are curling beneath his wrist and - _oh_ \- how it burns to be touched like this, by hands that cannot, _cannot_ offer solace.

"Remus."

That voice again, claiming him with breath that scalds his skin and – " _No_ . . . " - a kiss to his fingertips.

His body knows. Sensation wakes, surging through his blood while his mind struggles still, resistant, frightened. He tries to sit, to see this trick of his imagination - to name it and break the fevered spell that someone has cast, but the kiss comes again and his hands shake with recognition. "Sirius," he whispers. "Sirius."

It burns to come alive, to wake to this touch, but there are arms about him now, and whispered apologies made against his shoulder, branding him bone-deep - iron from flame.

"I'm back."

And he knows – feels the certainty of it in the palm of his hand, in the strands of hair that slide between his fingers. "I can feel you," he whispers, and holds on tight.


End file.
